It's not beginning to look a lot like Christmas, at least if you judge by the blockbuster releases coming out on DVD this month. From “The Dark Knight Rises” to “The Bourne Legacy” to the re-do of “Total Recall,” it's not too merry a list, even if you check it twice, but they hope to move a lot of units this season. A couple of fantasies about kids may find an audience hungry for cheer.

“Beasts of the Southern Wild” is an unpredictable tale centering on a 6-year-old bayou girl, and it's made some critics wonder out loud if little Quvenzhane Wallis is Oscar-worthy. A magic boy features in “The Odd Life of Timothy Green,” a bit of whimsy from writer-director Peter Hedges.

Banned in India to nobody's surprise, the highly original “Gandu” begins as a black-and-white study of an angry young loser, throws in rap music videos, and gets ever wilder in humor, music, graphic sex, drug use, split screen, and bursts of color. Somehow it works. We can't do better than the Variety blurb: “grabs audiences by the throat and works its way down.”

Film buffs seeking cheer should look for a lavish Criterion set called “Pier Paolo Pasolini's Trilogy of Life”: digital restorations of his strange, colorful, erotic early '70s films based on the Decameron, Canterbury Tales, and Arabian Nights, plus extra documentaries. Enough sex, how about violence?

“When Horror Came to Shochiku” has four Japanese freak-outs from 1967-68. “The X from Outer Space” is a plodding space opera that turns into a clumsy giant monster movie, but the other three are super-creepy and weird: the hallucinatory “Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell,” the gorgeously black-and-white “The Living Skeleton,” and the jaw-dropping insects-attack tale of “Genocide.” Where has this stuff been?

A Criterion edition of “Rosemary's Baby” includes the classic horror film and, on a bonus disc, new interviews with Roman Polanski and Mia Farrow and a feature profile of composer Krzyststof Komeda, so important to Polanski's career. Criterion also has a new digital restoration of Akira Kurosawa's essential “Rashomon” with commentary and making-of; Jean-Luc Godard's brilliantly maddening and confrontational “Weekend”; and, surprisingly, Michael Cimino's legendary floperoo “Heaven's Gate,” a three-and-a-half-hour western with Kris Kristofferson and Christopher Walken re-enacting the 1892 Johnson County War in Wyoming.

Blu-ray alert: “You used to be big,” says William Holden to forgotten star Gloria Swanson in Billy Wilder's “Sunset Boulevard,” and she snaps “I'm still big! It's the pictures that got small.” For its Blu debut, this mad gothic melodrama adds extras including, amazingly, a deleted scene — a song demo, not the lost morgue sequence, although that's offered in script form.

“Blade Runner 30th Anniversary Blu-ray” reissues all contents of the 25th anniversary (on moratorium for a while now), which is five versions of the movie plus bonuses, in a five-disc set or a collector's edition with a toy car. There's also a simpler 3-disc blu-ray book that still has all five cuts.